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Affected by high debt, online competition and geopolitical uncertainty, global tourism has been hit hard by the coronavirus pandemic crisis, halting traffic and staggering the lockdown of all countries. This paper analyzes the factors that caused tourism to collapse in 2020 and implicitly precarious economic effects. Romania will be the country studied for analysis, even if the direct contribution of tourism to GDP was 2.70% (2019) and total contribution (direct and indirect) of 5.2% (2019). The key questions posed are those related to the search for means to return to normalcy and to find ways to recover the hospitality industry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has brought to unavoidable prominence what feminist geopolitics has long insisted, namely that the global and the intimate are always, everywhere, already entangled. Drawing on Anglo-American experiences of the pandemic, this paper aims to make two key arguments. The first is that feminist geopolitics is a conceptual approach that is perhaps uniquely placed to make sense of COVID geographies. The second is to propose that this account of COVID speaks back to recent debates about the future of feminist geopolitics. Reflecting on recent debates about possible futures for feminist geopolitics, the paper will make the case for a materially-engaged feminist geopolitics which nevertheless keeps the socially-marked body at the heart of analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two major gatherings of Muslims which take place in Makkah and Madinah, the two holiest cities of Saudi Arabia, are umrah during Ramadan the 9th month and Hajj Dhul-Hajjah in the 12th month of the Islamic year. The COVID-19 outbreak has had a massive economic and social impact on pilgrimages for Muslims - because these gatherings could lead to widespread exposures and possible spread of COVID-19 to every corner of the world, it forced the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia to cancel Umrah in March 2020. The pandemic has also prompted the Saudi government to limit Hajj, with some exceptions, to pilgrims already in the country. As Hajj is one of the largest religious gathering in the world, Saudi officials, religious scholars, and scientists must meet the serious challenge to understand the impact of limiting this mass gathering. Over recent decades, the numbers of Hajj pilgrims and visitors has been increasing and existing facilities are struggling to meet their needs. Therefore, while many may see the COVID-19 outbreak during Hajj as a challenge, instead it may provide an opportunity for the Saudi Arabia government and the broader Muslim world to rethink their response to this essential Muslim pilgrimage during the pandemic. This paper will explore the COVID-19 challenges facing the government of Saudi Arabia and the Muslim world over the coming months and analyse economic implications of the outbreak. Therefore, the paper will clarify the serious COVID-19 health risk facing Hajj pilgrims and argues that geopolitics needs to be considered more seriously by organisations and institutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops the notion of "more-than-viral" geographies of the covid-19 pandemic. It introduces a set of commentaries on the pandemic in the Eurasian region and its links with the rest of the globe. Taking "more-than-human" perspectives in Human Geography as an inspiration, it develops ways of analyzing the covid-19 pandemic as a "more-than-viral" phenomenon in which human and viral agencies are entangled. In this Introduction to the special issue, we focus on three key intertwined sets of processes that run through this volume, and which both shape, and are being radically reshaped by, the pandemic: interconnections, inequalities, and the geopolitics of disease. Each of these inter-related processes is developed in various ways by the commentaries which make up the special issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has played out in Romania in a similar way to that in many other European countries. The government implemented decisive early measures which were able to keep the infection and mortality rates relatively low. This paper considers three distinctive aspects of the situation in Romania. First, the situation was complicated by the influence of transnational migrant workers, large numbers of whom returned to Romania when the pandemic started, accounting for distinct geographical variations in the rates of infection. At the same time, large numbers were able to leave the country at the height of the pandemic because they were "needed" for low-paid agricultural/social care work in western European countries. Second, the pandemic placed tension on Romania's relationship with the EU, whilst highlighting a number of existing issues between Romania and its neighbors. Third, Romania's strict lockdown measures exacerbated long-standing internal tensions, particularly with regard to the large and marginalized Roma community. The paper concludes by considering some of the possible longer-term implications for Romania of the COVID-19 pandemic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Several emerging technologies for agri-food systems are promoted by supporters as alleviating the instabilities of COVID-19 and thus increasingly necessary and inevitable. Compelled to pivot towards the pandemic, technologists align their projects with narratives of safety, security and resilience. This paper highlights the political contours of these technologies, arguing that proposed innovations are far from neutral paths toward a more sanitary and secure agri-food future. Most are limited in their capacity to disrupt patterns of racial and geopolitical hierarchy, ecological precarity, and concentrated power in the food system, or to fulfill pandemic relief promises in their current form. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper first discusses some of the basic spatial features of the COVID-19 crisis in Finland. Second, it considers the role of the state and state power in response to the pandemic and explores some of the geopolitical aspects of COVID-19 in the Finnish context. Finally, it argues that the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic highlights the role of health care as a crucial constituent of state power. The COVID-19 crisis has not only made state power more clearly visible, but has also revealed some of the ways in which the "extra-economic" occupies a central position in maintaining both economic and societal order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

COVID-19 has become a global public health pandemic which requires scientific, technical, public policy and health system responses at multi-scales. COVID-19 is also a pandemic that is impacting socio-economic and political systems in profound ways. This paper briefly outlines why and how pandemics may expose uneven socio-economic geographies of vulnerability and risk, and also be thought of in relation to environmental and non-human challenges to our geopolitical map of territorial nation-states and sovereignties. In relation to Southeast Asia we argue that preexisting and ongoing political-economy linkages are shaping key responses to COVID-19. In particular, we consider the geopolitical and geoeconomic reasoning of Cambodia and Myanmar, and their relations with China. We reflect on the factors that shape their national responses in response to the pandemic, characterized by certain silences and erasures to their local geographies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) is an Arctic highly autonomous subnational island jurisdiction (SNIJ) of Denmark, its former coloniser. The coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic of 2020 has influenced both Kalaallit Nunaat's relations with the outside world and relations between people and places within the territory. The Kalaallit Nunaat government's response to the pandemic, including both internal and external travel bans and restrictions on movement, has focused on eradicating the disease from the territory. This strategy, however, is challenged both by the SNIJ's economic reliance on Denmark and by the Danish government's own strategy of mitigating the disease. This paper explores the ways in which the coronavirus pandemic has altered how the people of Kalaallit Nunaat interact with the people of Denmark and with one another, ultimately shedding light on the relationship between islands, disease, and geopolitics more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This article is a collective writing experiment undertaken by philosophers of education affiliated with the PESGB (Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain). When asked to reflect on questions concerning the Philosophy of Education in a New Key in May 2020, it was unsurprising that the effects of the coronavirus pandemic on society and on education were foremost in our minds. We wanted to consider important philosophical and educational questions raised by the pandemic, while acknowledging that, first and foremost, it is a human tragedy. With nearly a million deaths reported worldwide to date, and with everyone effected in one way or another by Covid-19, there is a degree of discomfort, and a responsibility to be sensitive, in reflecting and writing about it academically. Members of this 'Covid Collective' come from various countries, with perspectives from Great Britain and Ireland well represented, and we see academic practice as a globally connected enterprise, especially since the digital revolution in academic publishing. The concerns raised in this article relate to but move beyond Covid-19, reflecting the impact of neoliberalism [and other political developments] on geopolitics with educational concerns as central to our focus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]